If you want to attract hackers to write software that will sell your hardware, you have to make it something that they themselves use. It’s not enough to make it “open.” It has to be open and good.
And open and good is what Macs are again, finally. The intervening years have created a situation that is, as far as I know, without precedent: Apple is popular at the low end and the high end, but not in the middle. My seventy year old mother has a Mac laptop. My friends with PhDs in computer science have Mac laptops. And yet Apple’s overall market share is still small.
Paul Graham sees Apple differently than Tim does (
20). Granted, Solaris never enters the picture (though curiously, x86 hardware and the OSes that drive it’s sales are mentioned).
It looks to me like leaving OS X for Solaris — as a desktop/laptop OS — is abandoning a boutique product, as people describe Apple, for an even more esoteric one. If I am going to run UNIX on fast commodity hardware, it will be with Linux or one of the BSDs for driver support, etc. If I am going to have shop around to find hardware that will run some esoteric OS, I’m not really able to leverage the competitive nature of the commodity market and I’m getting closer to where I just was: I’m buying specialized equipment again.